Advice on Guitar effects and pedals

When you play rock guitar you will want to have the distorted guitar sound. You can get this sound with distortion or overdrive pedals. One of these effects is essential to have for playing rock guitar.

Your amp may have a built-in effect but you really need foot operated floor guitar effect pedals to be able to switch an effect on and off easily while playing. The pedals cost around $100 each. You can also get ones that are tailored towards different types of rock or metal.

Guitar Distortion Overdrive Pedal

You can also buy other pedals to get a fuller sound or a lead guitar sound, such a delay, flanger, chorus, reverb, wah-wah, compressor etc.

A cheaper alternative is to get a guitar multi-effect pedal unit. These can cost around $200 up. They have all the guitar effects built-in as digital electronic processors. Software patches are set-up to blend the different effects and give different sounds.

Get a unit with at least 3 foot pedal switches on it. This way you can set up a clean, rhythm and lead patch for each sound and switch between them with one tap. If there is only one pedal then you need to toggle through the patches to get the one you want which will interrupt your guitar playing.

Also experiment with editing the patches so that you can see how the effects and settings interact and make the overall sound. Messing with the settings yourself is the best to learn how effects work.